I suffered from having a rather weird combat draw throughout (only 1 Carrion Crows, for example), and a somewhat unfortunate crypt draw (all 3 the non-Ahrimane vampires came up) and twice had minions toporised and then diablerised, which was rather sucky. I was able to pressure Phillip fairly well early on, but never got close to ousting him. Val's deck was too strong for both Gehard's and my decks. I didn't stick around to watch the end game. With a few different draws, I might have been able to survive better, but so the game goes sometimes.

In the second game, I tried the mid-cap Serpentis bleed deck. Val (weenie guns) was bleeding Gehard (Tariq) bleeding me, with me starting. I had a great start, being bring out the two-cap, and play the hunting ground early. This allowed me to pay for the Eternal Masks, and, although Val was able to bring out several minions quickly, the time taken to find his intercept locations meant I could bleed unhindered at the start. Gehard's deck was unable to resist the weenie swarm, and he conceded fairly early. Val helped my cause by paying for several guns, and I was never short of S:CE, so the combat was never an issue. There was a turn where things looked like they might be a little tight, as I went down to 6 pool, and was facing six minions, and some farm, but, with a Catatonic Fear at superior to knock a minion into torpor, and a vessel to destroy one of Val's blood dolls meant I was able to push through.

The Settite deck shows some promise, but the card balance needs work. I ideally also need to find room for the Path's as well, as being able to bleed for 2 at +1 stealth with one card at no cost will be useful, and it will make the Truth of a Thousand Lies a much more attractive option to play.

Every so often, there are a spate of blog posts ragging on git. Probably because of who wrote it, and it's importance to the kernel, negative criticism of git tends to get rather widely broadcast, and attracts the same sort of stupid fanboy'ish flamewars that plague many bits of the free software ecosystem, and there always seems to be a "my DVCS is better than yours" flamewar just waiting in the wings to really get the discussion going.

To me, much of the discussion feels very much like the old emacs vs vi flamewars, before they became parodies of themselves. Given the trend towards easy interoperability, with tools such as git-svn, the bzr svn plugin, the various git fastimport helpers, and so forth, increasingly, the choice of (D)VCS is as independent of the other people in the project as the choice of editor. In a few years, hopefully people will actually realise this, and the whole debate will calm down. At which point, we can all return to arguing about the important things, like editors.